Above, David Carer, left, has a beer at the Little Rebel Inn in Jackson, Tenn., while bar owner George Webb relaxes behind the bar on a slow night. Carer voted for black candidate Harold Ford Jr. in a statewide race in 2006, but he says he's not going to vote for Obama. Below, volunteers wave signs in support of Obama outside a voting center in Nashville, Tenn.

US Senator and Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama listens to the concerns of local residents as he participates in a roundtable discussion on economic opportunity regarding predatory lending and mortgages 16 January 2008 in the backyard of a private home in the Los Angeles suburb of Van Nuys. AFP PHOTO/Robyn BECK

Sitting at a rural crossroads in solidly Democratic western Tennessee, the Den Tree is a little country store where the customers put peanuts in their Coca-Cola, hunt raccoon for sport and consider opossum a delicacy.

And they don’t mind lingering to talk politics. Customer Pat Garrett said he wasn’t sure whom he was voting for in the state’s Feb. 5 primary, but he was sure of one thing: It’d never be Barack Obama.

“It’s regional, you might say,” Garrett, who is white, said, then grinned broadly.

A hundred miles away, on Nashville’s north side, race is also on the mind of Dianetta Johnson as she mulls her vote. A barber for eight years in the modest shop of Vernon Winfrey, Oprah Winfrey’s father, Johnson said she likes Obama but will vote for Hillary Rodham Clinton. She doesn’t think Obama can make it to the White House.

“It would be wonderful, but society itself just isn’t ready for it,” said Johnson, as she briskly ran electric clippers over the head of a customer until just a bare gloss of hair remained.

Even as Obama’s victory in Iowa has presented for some a convincing example of how the relationship between race and politics is changing in America, many experts believe that when the election is over — and whatever the result — his candidacy will show exactly how deeply race and politics remain intertwined.

David Axelrod, a senior Obama adviser, said the Illinois senator’s candidacy is about healing America’s divisions, not exacerbating them — and that includes race. But experts say the issue is not easily controlled, and many expect race to affect the 2008 presidential campaign in unpredictable and powerful ways.

There are signs of that already.

Last week, Hillary Clinton, who has some of the strongest civil- rights credentials of any politician in the contest, found herself on the wrong side of the race discussion for many black voters, cast as someone who believes that the civil-rights movement needed a white man to make it truly effective.

In Nevada, Latinos voted nearly 2-to-1 for Clinton over Obama in Saturday’s caucuses, partly the result, political analysts say, of long-standing frictions between the Latino and black communities.

And in South Carolina, the Obama campaign has run ads targeted at black voters that show the candidate surrounded by crowds of white admirers. The ads are meant to counteract the perception by some blacks that Obama is unelectable because of his color, something that doesn’t seem to worry his white supporters.

“He has the best ideas and chance of anyone to make a change,” said Shawn Rourk, 23, of Columbia, S.C. “We’ve been able to look past racial boundaries.”

Yet those fears of some blacks are based on a lived experience of the way race and politics can collide in this country. Those who believe whites don’t vote for black candidates have statistics on their side.

Consider this: There have been just two black governors and three black U.S. senators since Reconstruction.

About 8 percent of state legislators nationwide are black, though the minority group makes up 13 percent of the population. Include all elected officials, and the number who are black drops to less than 4 percent.

But those statistics hide key distinctions, said David Bositis, a scholar with Washington’s Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies who researches black candidates nationwide.

One is simply geography — the fact that race is politically important in the South in ways that it isn’t in many other places. Illinois, Ohio and New York, all states with significant black populations, regularly elect black candidates to statewide office. A black politician has never held statewide office in Mississippi or South Carolina. Alabama has elected just three, and those were judges to the state court who had no opponents.

The case of Mississippi alone speaks volumes. It is the state with the highest-percentage black population (37 percent) and also the largest number of black elected officials (more than 850). But nearly all were elected by constituencies — cities, counties or congressional districts — where a majority of voters were black.

It’s a pattern that holds across the country. Of all black state legislators, 98 percent were elected from districts that were either predominantly black or black and Latino, Bositis’ data show. When all black elected officials are considered, that figure is still over 90 percent.

“There are a whole lot of things that can determine in a racially sensitive country how race plays” in politics, said Ron Walters, who helped run Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaigns and is now a professor at the University of Maryland.

In 2008, “race is a factor, but how it plays is going to depend on a whole set of circumstances that we have yet to see.”

Watching Tennessee

One place to look for clues is Tennessee.

Although the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan, which still has a small presence, Tennessee is far less conservative than the states of the Deep South. It is anchored by strong Democratic regions that stretch from Memphis through the state’s western rolling hills and on to Nashville. In 2006, Harold Ford came within a hair of becoming the state’s first black U.S. senator.

It is also one of a handful of Southern states that, while trending Republican in recent presidential election cycles, may be within Democratic reach in 2008, joined by Arkansas, Florida and Virginia.

Tom Lee, who worked as a senior adviser on Ford’s campaign, said the similarities to Obama are striking. Both are young, dynamic campaigners with huge crossover appeal, drawing significant numbers of independents and even Republicans of both races to their causes.

But Ford’s campaign has also become an object lesson of how race and politics interact in modern campaigns, especially in the South.

As the campaign of Ford’s opponent was flailing, the national Republican Party ran an ad that showed a white woman claiming she met Ford at a Playboy party, ending with a flirtatious solicitation: “Harold, call me.”

Leading or even in the polls up to that point, Ford’s popularity dropped after the ad ran, never fully recovering. Lee said that the election didn’t turn on a single ad and that the candidate had problems with negative impressions of the Ford family, a political dynasty in Memphis.

But he said the “call me” ad was part of a larger barrage of references subtly aimed at sexually charged stereotypes of black men. And he expects the same will happen to Obama.

“We had always avoided talking about race, but it was injected into the conversation,” Lee said. “That forced people to talk about race — and at a very delicate time in the campaign.”

Ford made point

In Jackson, Tenn., a hundred miles west of Lee’s Nashville office, sits the Little Rebel Inn, with its huge Confederate flag painted on the bar’s outside wall. Ford helped make the bar famous. He stopped there often during the 2006 campaign, mingling with customers to make a political point — that he could reach across cultural divides, but also that the symbols of the old Confederacy don’t always mean what people think.

“He was a real good guy,” said George Webb, the inn’s owner.

Still, analysts say that a primary reason Ford lost his Senate bid is because of weak support in this part of western Tennessee, which is solidly Democrat and mostly rural.

Across the street from the Little Rebel Inn, silver-haired couples slide across the dance floor at the VFW on a recent Monday, as a local band plays country music. At a torn felt card table under a low-hanging lamp in the back, a half-dozen members, all of them white, talk about the presidential campaign. Mostly they talk about Barack Obama.

They talk about how they think he’ll be shot before he ever makes it to the White House. How the Democrats are doomed in the South if he gets the nomination. How a country that is at war in the Middle East would never elect a Muslim.

The fact that Obama is a member of the United Church of Christ, a mainstream Protestant denomination, doesn’t seem to sway their doubts. It may be that the issue is about something else. Obama’s remarkable story — born of a white American mother and Kenyan father, growing up partly in Indonesia before going to Harvard — is for some voters too far outside the lines of what they see as comfortable and familiar.

“I don’t like his name: Obama Hussein,” said Jim Shannon, 70, a staunch Democrat, referring to the candidate’s middle name. “They just might’ve well added ‘Hitler’ in there.”

Larry Meggs, 64, a salesman and the VFW’s post commander, was more measured.

“We’ve never had a woman president. We’ve never had a black president. It goes against good ol’ boy attitudes,” he said.

It’s those attitudes that may make 2008 a very tough year for Don Farmer.

Though his colleagues in other regions are giddy about the prospect of historic candidates and high turnouts, Farmer — a member of the Tennessee Democratic Party’s executive committee and its vice chairman for western Tennessee — sees a hard slog ahead.

“When our voters go into the booth, we want them to start at the top and stay in the column as they go down. If they don’t like the people at the top, that’s not going to happen,” Farmer said.

“In this area, they are not going to elect an African-American to be president of the United States. It’s just the way people have been brought up.”

What about November?

But Farmer’s remarks about voters leaves out an important qualifier: He’s talking about whites.

State by state, the South has the most concentrated population of black voters of any region in the country. African-Americans make up 29 percent of the population in South Carolina, 26 percent in Alabama and 17 percent in Tennessee. Florida, likely to be key and well within Democrats’ reach this year, is 16 percent black.

Axelrod, the senior Obama aide, points out that white politicians from the South such as Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine and former Mississippi Gov. Ray Mabus support Obama’s campaign because they believe he can energize those voters like no other candidate in the field, attracting enough independents and disaffected Republicans along the way to be a potent force in the region.

An American research group poll released Friday showed Obama leading Clinton in South Carolina by six points, a result that reflects the solidifying preferences by voters since Obama’s win in Iowa.

There is no doubt that a black presidential candidate can win Southern Democratic primaries and caucuses. In 1988, Jesse Jackson won six of them: Virginia, Louisiana, South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi and Alabama.

The question really is November.

But black and white voters alike sense that Obama is something fundamentally different than the more narrowly defined candidacy of Jackson, and the enthusiasm driven by that feeling is palpable.

“I was surprised by Iowa. But when I got up the next morning, the adrenaline was flowing. I was on Cloud Nine,” said the Rev. Johnny Shaw, the head of the Black Caucus in the Tennessee legislature and the first black man to represent a district in rural west Tennessee since Reconstruction.

“My God, if there was any time I’m proud of who I am, it’s now,” Shaw said.

As he gossips in a vinyl-covered cinema chair in Vernon Winfrey’s Nashville barbershop, Rufus Turner says much the same, echoing the historic language of the civil-rights movement.

“That speech that Martin Luther King made in Washington, D.C., about judging on the content of your character,” said Turner. “He said one day, that moment will come. Obama is reaching the fruit of that moment now.”

“It’s the promised land (King) was talking about,” agreed 69-year-old Roland Jones, as Winfrey snipped at his silver hair.

Still, Obama’s success has provoked unexpected anxieties among some black voters, including the fear that as his chance at gaining the White House grows, so does the possibility that he’ll be assassinated. The issue has become significant enough that Obama’s wife, Michelle, tried to dampen the impact of those worries during a speech last week in Atlanta.

“That’s a very real fear,” said Lee Burgess, 25, a barber in Sumter, S.C., who is black. “He knew (the risk) when he decided to run.”

But experts suggest those anxieties are more telling of the pessimism among some blacks over the idea that America can break through to a new era of race relations, one that isn’t always defined by conflict, even violence.

The fact that those doubts come from both historical memory and personal experience makes them that much harder to dislodge.

“Where we are, it’s a struggle. We understand we are the underdog,” South Carolina state Rep. Bakari T. Sellers said, talking about Obama’s candidacy.

Sellers, who says at 23 he is the youngest black state legislator in the United States, represents Orangeburg, S.C., a place that has a notorious history to African-Americans here. In 1968, three blacks were killed by authorities over a protest to integrate a white bowling alley, an event that became known as the Orangeburg Massacre. Sellers’ father was one of those arrested during the protest.

As he walks down the capitol steps, Sellers points out the Confederate flag that flies beside the building. South Carolina’s was the last state capitol in the country to fly the banner. It was removed from the dome in 2000 after a tourism boycott and a contentious debate, but moved only a few hundred feet, where it now flutters near a guard post.

Still, the flag has lost much of its potency as an issue for residents, and Sellers said that black voters should not let anxiety hold them back.

“What voters have to overcome is fear. Like Michelle (Obama) says, ‘It’s not time to be afraid any longer,’ ” he said.

The reaction to Obama’s candidacy in many ways breaks along generational lines, for both blacks and whites. Older voters tend to see him in terms of the sweep of history, stoking both hopes and fears.

Leaning on a cubicle wall in his insurance office in Columbia, S.C., James Whitmire remembers when the idea of sending a black politician to the White House was a pipe dream. When U.S. Rep. Shirley Chisholm — the first black woman elected to Congress — ran for president in 1972, he said, it was clear to everyone that it was simply symbolic.

“I think America has softened to it. It’s more plausible now than 20 to 30 years ago,” said Whitmire, 49, who is black.

But his sense of history also makes him question whether Obama will win the South Carolina primary, despite his poll numbers. “White Democrats will simply not support a black candidate when they get behind that lever.”

For young voters, history has less weight.

“It’s already obvious he’s black, we know that,” said Benjamin Alteme, 30, while getting a haircut at a barbershop across from South Carolina State and Claflin universities in Orangeburg.

Alteme just joined the Navy and is about to ship out. He likes Obama because he’s talking about alternative energy sources and weaning America off foreign oil.

“What does being black have to do with getting my troops out of Iraq?”

Strategically, Obama and his team talk about race almost solely through the campaign’s larger themes: that the country needs to leave its divisions behind; that we have more that unites us than divides us.

Almost universally, black voters said they saw that as something positive. Talking about race, “that’s not a way to win friends and votes,” said state Sen. Kay Patterson, a black politician who has held office in South Carolina nearly continuously for 34 years. “I think that’s a reason he’s going to make it.”

This reasoning encapsulates the notion that black voters are more politically astute than ever before and don’t need black candidates to continually discuss — or even be products of — the civil- rights movement.

Obama is playing the right, professional role, said Burgess, the Sumter barber.

“You don’t want to overplay the race card, because then people will think that’s all he has to say.”

Axelrod, who has helped Obama win over voters in Chicago’s black urban neighborhoods and largely white southern Illinois, said that’s not likely to change as the candidate moves to primaries in the South, starting with South Carolina on Saturday and moving to most of the Southern states by Feb. 5.

“He sees the discussion of race as part of the larger discussion in our society,” Axelrod said. “That we’ve been separated and divided, and those divisions often have been exploited, instead of focusing on our common humanity.

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